Naudsonce | Page 4

tadpole, six
feet long by three at the widest, fitted with visible-light and infra-red
screen pickups and crammed with detection instruments--ready to
relieve the combat car over the village. The contact team crowded into
the Number One landing craft, which had been fitted out as a temporary
headquarters. Prefab-hut elements were already being unloaded from
the other craft.
Everybody felt that a drink was in order, even if it was two hours short
of cocktail time. They carried bottles and glasses and ice to the front of
the landing craft and sat down in front of the battery of view and
communication screens. The central screen was a two-way, tuned to
one in the officers' lounge aboard the Hubert Penrose, two hundred
miles above. In it, also provided with drinks, were Captain Guy
Vindinho and two other Navy officers, and a Marine captain in
shipboard blues. Like Gofredo, Vindinho must have gotten into the
Service on tiptoe; he had a bald dome and a red beard, and he always
looked as though he were gloating because nobody knew that his name
was really Rumplestiltskin. He had been watching the contact by screen.
He lifted his glass toward Meillard.
"Over the hump, Paul?"
Meillard raised his drink to Vindinho. "Over the first one. There's a
whole string of them ahead. At least, we sent them away happy. I
hope."
"You're going to make permanent camp where you are now?" one of
the other officers asked. Lieutenant-Commander Dave Questell; ground
engineering and construction officer. "What do you need?"
There were two viewscreens from pickups aboard the 2500-foot battle

cruiser. One, at ten-power magnification, gave a maplike view of the
broad valley and the uplands and mountain foothills to the south. It was
only by tracing the course of the main river and its tributaries that they
could find the tiny spot of the native village, and they couldn't see the
landing craft at all. The other, at a hundred power, showed the oblong
mound, with the village on its flat top, little dots around a circular
central plaza. They could see the two turtle-shaped landing-craft, and
the combat car, that had been circling over the mound, landing beside
them, and, sometimes, a glint of sunlight from the snooper that had
taken its place.
The snooper was also transmitting in, to another screen, from two
hundred feet above the village. From the sound outlet came an
incessant gibber of native voices. There were over a hundred houses, all
small and square, with pyramidal roofs. On the end of the mound
toward the Terran camp, animals of at least four different species were
crowded, cattle that had been herded up from the meadows at the first
alarm. The open circle in the middle of the village was crowded, and
more natives lined the low palisade along the edge of the mound.
"Well, we're going to stay here till we learn the language," Meillard
was saying. "This is the best place for it. It's completely isolated,
forests on both sides, and seventy miles to the nearest other village. If
we're careful, we can stay here as long as we want to and nobody'll find
out about us. Then, after we can talk with these people, we'll go to the
big town."
* * * * *
The big town was two hundred and fifty miles down the valley, at the
forks of the main river, a veritable metropolis of almost three thousand
people. That was where the treaty would have to be negotiated.
[Illustration: "... But no two of them speak the same language!"]
"You'll want more huts. You'll want a water tank, and a pipeline to that
stream below you, and a pump," Questell said. "You think a month?"

Meillard looked at Lillian Ransby. "What do you think?"
"Poodly-doodly-oodly-foodle," she said. "You saw how far we didn't
get this afternoon. All we found out was that none of the standard
procedures work at all." She made a tossing gesture over her shoulder.
"There goes the book; we have to do it off the cuff from here."
"Suppose we make another landing, back in the mountains, say two or
three hundred miles south of you," Vindinho said. "It's not right to keep
the rest aboard two hundred miles off planet, and you won't be wanting
liberty parties coming down where you are."
"The country over there looks uninhabited," Meillard said. "No villages,
anyhow. That wouldn't hurt, at all."
"Well, it'll suit me," Charley Loughran, the xeno-naturalist, said. "I
want a chance to study the life-forms in a state of nature."
Vindinho nodded. "Luis, do you anticipate any trouble with this crowd
here?" he asked.
"How about it, Mark? What do they look like to you? Warlike?"
"No." He stated the opinion he had formed. "I had a